Georgia coach Kirby Smart remembers having his head shaved when he was a freshman football player at his alma mater back in the mid-1990s and busing tables after team meals.
Older players putting the newbies in their place by hazing remains ingrained in team sports at all levels in the United States. That is not the way Smart wants to run the Bulldogs, who have won two straight national championships.
“Now, those freshmen, the guys we sign, they have to play,” Smart said this week at Southeastern Conference media days. “So when you create this separation of, they have to do this and they have to do that, they’re not ready to play. They’re like a different team.”
While major college sports programs have become multimillion-dollar, high-stakes businesses run more like professional teams, ritualistic hazing remains a problematic tradition within them. School rules forbidding hazing, more than 40 state laws against it and horror story after horror story have not stopped it.
“I think it’s happening more often than people realize and we see it making the headlines around what’s happening in high school locker rooms,” said Elizabeth Allan, a professor at the University of Maine who has studied hazing on campus. “And so students are coming to college often having experienced hazing in their high school athletics programs.”
Northwestern fired longtime football coach Pat Fitzgerald after a university investigation found allegations of hazing by 11 current or former players, including “forced participation, nudity and sexualized acts of a degrading nature.” Fitzgerald, who was reportedly making more than $5 million per year, was let go after he was initially given a two-week suspension.
The school is now facing at least two lawsuits by former players and more are possible. Players said hazing was so rampant in the football program it had become normalized.
“You’re overpowered, you’re dominated by the culture,” said Lloyd Yates, a member of the Northwestern football team from 2015-17.
Allan said studies have shown about half of all students report experiencing some type of hazing in high school. She said hazing can be found wherever a large group is trying to establish a hierarchy.
“If you understand hazing as a form of an abuse of power, then you can see how in those environments or group situations where people are jockeying for power or trying to enforce some kind of hierarchies, hazing is an easy way to kind of make clear who’s got the power,” she said.
She added that often those who have been hazed are conditioned to perpetuate the bad behavior.
“It was done to me, so … this is what we do here,” Allan said.
Forty-four states, including Illinois, have laws against hazing; some treat it as a felony.
The NCAA, the largest governing body for college sports in the United States that includes more than 1,100 member schools and more than 400,000 athletes, does not have rules regarding hazing. Instead, the association defers to state laws and school policies.
Particularly egregious and violent acts of hazing routinely draw headlines. Fraternities and other school-based groups have often been involved despite the efforts of organizations like the Anti-Hazing Coalition.
